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Using cake to model the Earth

Today I used a jam and cream sponge cake for my students to learn the benefits and limitations of models.

It was a store-bought cake from Coles. I made some vanilla icing with added blue food colouring and spread it on top of the cake. I then used icing writing pens to draw the continents.

Year 7 students compared the cake to the structure of the Earth. They came up with some benefits of models such as making it easier to visualise things that are difficult to imagine. They also came up with limitations such as the cake not being spherical, not showing molten rock in the mantle and not showing the temperature changes of inside the Earth.